Many websites currently track a visitor's actions on a website and then use this information to improve a user's experience. To identify a user's journey on a website, a visitor is generally assigned a unique identifier that may be used to correlate actions taken by the visitor on the website. This identifier must be unique for each visitor. Coupling the identifier with the visited domain name may form the basis of segmenting a visitor's actions.
One method of tracking actions a visitor takes on a website may be to use web server logs, which usually contain the resource name accessed by a visitor, the time and date the resource was accessed, the Internet Protocol Address (“IP Address”) of the visitor, the scheme used by the client web browser program to connect to the network server, the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (“TCP/IP”) port the connection was established with, the protocol used to access the network resource, and/or the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (“HTTP”) response code. This data is usually mined once a day, or even every few hours, by using log file analysis tools. These analyzers generally search each log file associated with the domain name of the website and may subsequently feed the results back to another program for further analysis and/or storage.
Another method to log visitor activity on a website may be to write client-side script that is triggered when one or more events occur. An event may be, for example, a click on a hyperlink, the movement of a mouse pointer across the screen, or the like. The event data generally contains the unique identifier assigned to the visitor along with other event related data, such as the scheme used to connect, the scheme used to establish the network connection, any cookie data related of the domain name attached to the website, or the like. This data may then be transferred to another network server that stores this data. This transfer may be performed via an Application Program Interface (“API”), which may support the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The stored data may be further analyzed and/or aggregated, and the results may be stored, e.g., for reporting purposes.
When a website owner engages a third-party service provider to track visitor activities on a website, such services generally provide information about a user's journey on a given domain name but at a cost of time, money, or both to the website owner. Such services generally also rely on third-party cookies (“TPC”), which are often subject to deletion by the visitor and/or being blocked by a web browser program setting.
Website owners may set their own cookies, which may include the unique identifier assigned to a visitor, information about the visitor's preferences, (optionally) the user's login data, or the like. These cookies are called first-party cookies (“FPC”) and may be less prone to deletion or being blocked. Often, these cookies may be mandatory for a visitor to properly view a website.
With TPC, website visitors may worry about personally identifiable information (“PII”), such as telephone numbers, email address, mailing address, etc., being stored and/or leaked to marketers or other third-parties who have not explicitly been granted permission by the website visitor. For this additional reason, TPC may be prone to periodic removal by the visitor. However, as explained above, FPC is less prone to removal by the website visitor. Using TPC as a means to track a visitor may, therefore, be unreliable and subject to trust issues. As a result, website visitors may periodically delete TPC. Furthermore, web browsers may offer a default policy restricting cookie storage access only to the original domain name being visited. That is, the domain name currently being browsed may be the only network resource permitted to set a cookie on the client node. At the level of the web browser program, exposing cookies of different domain names to a client-side script may pose a legitimate security threat to the website visitor, and, accordingly, most web browsers by default will not allow such access. In addition, this web browser program setting generally cannot be overridden by the owner of the client node for fear that a malware or trojan virus may take advantage of this attack vector.
The disclosed method and system for using first party cookies to anonymous track visitors overcome one or more of the problems set forth above and/or other problems of the prior art.